Spanner, Google’s Global Database is Now Open to Everyone

Back in 2007, Google developed its own global database called “Spanner”. Since its inception, the company has relied on this database for many of its own products, ranging from Google Photos to Gmail. Now, 10 years after Spanner was first conceived, Google has made Spanner available for everyone via a public beta.

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Described as a service that “lets customers have their cake and eat it too”. Spanner is a globally distributed relational database service that supports “Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability”(ACID) transactions while preserving SQL semantics. Most importantly, the database does so without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability.

By making Cloud Spanner available to the masses, Google hopes that database administrators and developers would leverage the system. After all, Spanner is the “best-of-both-worlds” case in terms of databases as it offers the transaction consistency of traditional databases, as well as the horizontal scaling and data distribution of NoSQL databases.

In addition to that, Cloud Spanner Product Manager Deepti Srivastava adds that the service “supports distribfduted transactions, schemas and DDL statements, SQL queries and JDBC drivers”. Libraries for popular languages such as Java, Go, Python and Node.js are also offered to clients.

If Cloud Spanner looks interesting to you, Google has provided a full pricelist for the service here.